Sunday

In some areas, Ohio State ticket sales lag behind previous years

(Editor's note: I'm doing a new weekly spot on 92.3 The Fan every Thursday at 10:50 a.m., which you can hear on the radio or by streaming the station live at The Fan's website. The spot essentially is highlights of the best of my reporting each week.)The (Toledo) Blade reports that tickets to Ohio State games are becoming increasingly available, and at a buyer's price.
Long hard to get, Ohio State tickets, The Blade reports, still are available for Saturday's game.
StubHub, an online ticket resale company, listed more than 950 tickets starting at $35 as of Tuesday afternoon. Almost every national broker had two seats together for $50 each or less.
Two weeks earlier, the announced attendance of 104,745 for Ohio State's game against Central Florida marked the first Ohio Stadium crowd below 105,000 since a late-season game against New Mexico State in 2009.
For its part, Ohio State told the newspaper that the main metric it follows is season ticket demand, and that figure is steady if not rising, an athletics official said.

More NHL lockout effects

On Tuesday, I wrote of what some NHL teams are doing for refunds for their season ticket holders, who'd already made deposits on the 2012-13 season, which now is in jeopardy.
Here's more:

The Columbus Blue Jackets are offering refunds, but also 4% interest on funds left in customers' accounts, to be used for future purchases.
The Blue Jackets, who long have struggled at the box office and agreed to a new deal with the city and Franklin County to have the latter two entities pay for the arena's management, have plenty at stake in the lockout: This season's All-Star game, the awarding of which was a decision by the NHL viewed by many as something of a last gasp to save the franchise's future in Columbus, is set to be held in Columbus this season.

The Florida Panthers have laid off a dozen employees, including their mascot, Stanley C. Panther. (Can you imagine the horror if, say, the Monsters were forced to lay off my boy Sully C. Goal?!)
The Ottawa Senators, too, have laid off people, while the Minnesota Wild have cut back salaries. (The Blue Jackets, in the above-linked story, said they're not planning front-office layoffs at this point. That, of course, is what they all say.)